Honor roll:Costa Book Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Costa Book Award for Poetry. They are ranked by honors received.
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Corpus—Michael Symmons Roberts’ ambitious and inventive fourth collection—centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds—life and after-life, death and resurrection—encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in “Choreography”) and science (“Mapping the Genome”), these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the…
Jean Sprackland’s third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way—all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat—for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.
Set in “Patience’s Parlour”, a small mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria, at a time of political unrest, Letter to Patience is a vividly atmospheric book-length poem divided into cantos. The letter writer is in Britain, where he has returned with his Nigerian wife and children to nurse his dying father. The poem is not only a biography, or an essay on post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and of one man's search for meaning in difficult times.
Cold Calls: Volume 5 of Logue's Homer
Helen, the world’s most beautiful woman, the wife of Lord Menelaos of Sparta, left Greece in the company of Paris, the son of Priam, King of Troy. To repossess her, a thousand Greek ships sailed to Troy. Nine years have passed. The Greeks have not achieved their aim. Indeed, after a quarrel between Achilles their leader and Agamemnon their king, the Trojans, led by Paris’s brother, Prince Hector, have driven the Greeks off the plain of Troy and back behind the palisade protecting their ships. Achilles refuses to help them. It is night…
The scene is set for…
Landing Light: Poems
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver…
—from “Waking with Russell”
Hailed for its “enormous skill and verve” (The Guardian) and its “seriousness and moral urgency” (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years. Ceaselessly inquiring, Don Paterson discovers the love…
The Ice Age: A Collection of Poems
The new collection from one of the best new talents in contemporary poetry Paul Farley’s debut collection: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You was one of the most highly acclaimed in recent years. It won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection;a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 1999 he was named as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection was described as ‘a stunning debut’ by the Sunday Times.
The Ice Age sees Farley extend his range to embrace a new and philosophical…
Selima Hill’s Bunny is set in the haunted house of adolescence. Always blackly comic, sometimes beguilingly erotic, each echoing poem opens a door on madness or menace, shame or blame. Bunny tells the intimate story of a young girl growing up in London in the 1950s, confused and betrayed but finding herself, becoming independent.
Appearances are always deceptive. That predatory lodger. The animals outside and within. The girl sectioned in the hospital, nursing her sense of wrong. The blueness of things. The fire.
What the house contains, it…
Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in this collection are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is Burnside territory: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man’s land—the ‘somewhere in between’ of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating. In his new translation, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is both true, line by line, to the original poem and a fundamental expression of his own creative gift.
Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes’s romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections…
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